DCUO going free-to-play will “open up” the game to more players, says SOE

Lorin Jameson, executive producer of DC Universe Online, has said adding a free-to-play business model to the MMO will “open up” the game to more players.

Having this added option, was also a way to appease players asking for different ways to play the MMO.

“We have a game that’s resonating with our player base,” Jameson told Eurogamer. “Especially on the PS3, we’ve been getting a lot of people into the game to try it out.

“Our customers have been saying they wanted more options for how to play the game. The subscription model is relatively new on the PS3 and we’ve already had success with our other free-to-play titles, like Clone War Adventures and Free Realms, so we thought this was a good time to introduce some alternate models to allow as many people as possible to play the game.”

Jameson said the switch had nothing to do with falling subscription numbers, and while he wouldn’t provide any figures, he said the game was doing well.

“No, I think we’ve been doing really quite well,” he said. “We sold a lot of copies, we’ve had a lot of people paying and playing the game. This was just a way to open up to even more folks. We recently had our mega server launch which allowed us to basically get all the power of all the players into platform specific and region specific servers. That really goosed our numbers a good amount.

“And then the release of our first mini expansion DLC, Fight For the Light, gave us a bump as well. So actually we’ve been looking really good. This has been a challenging year with the [PSN] outage but we’ve recovered quite well since then.”

DC Universe Online players can expect Update 5 to hit soon, and a second DLC expansion before the end of the year. It will focus on The Flash.